To those who thought I was dead, rumors of that were greatly exaggerated. Sorry for not being around here at all in the last two weeks, but summertime is filled with such intermittent correspondence. You know how it goes.
Been in Jamaica and Boston the last two weeks. Jamaica for a week to attend my sister Stephanie’s wedding, and Boston to cover a little Stanley Cup freelance-wise and house sit for Steph while she finished up another week in Jamaica on the honeymoon.

A few snapshots of the last two weeks:
– Here’s one of me in my hairdo, in Jamaica mon. Yeah mon. Dreadlock Rasta!
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– I still have approximately 495 bug bites on my legs from the Jamaican sojourn. Take some “Off” if you go there. Nice place otherwise.

– I almost never tell anyone what I really do on the road. No offense to anyone here, but honestly the last thing I want to do on an off night is talk sports all night, and anytime I say “I’m a sports writer!” to any guy on a plane or wherever on the road, invariably I end up getting sucked in to a 90-minute talk with questions such as “Do you interview players in the locker room?” (no, I communicate telepathically actually, it’s the new craze) or “How do you think the Detroit Lions will do next year?”
I usually say I sell life insurance when people ask what I do on the road. That shuts ’em up quick. That goes double for any guy in Canada. If they find out I write about hockey for a living primarily, it’s going to be two hours of nonstop talk about the injustice of who Ron Wilson is playing on the fourth line in Toronto, or who Ottawa is looking at with their top-5 pick in the draft. I don’t want to be rude, though, so I’ll talk the hockey with the guy if he finds out what I really do. Occasionally (very occasionally) I get recognized and that’s all she wrote. We’re talking hockey for however long that flight lasts when that happens. It’s OK, sometimes I even enjoy it.

But anyway, on the way to Jamaica, the guy next to me asked what I did for a living and I said, “Sell life insurance.” Lo and behold, the dude was in the market to buy some, and next thing I know I’m getting peppered with questions like “Which is better, whole or term?” Or, “If I want an open casket at my mother’s funeral, how much more is that than a closed casket?”

After some pathetic attempts at engaging the earnest soul, I finally had to come clean. I didn’t sell insurance. I wrote sports for a living, primarily hockey. Of course, the guy was from Canada, and not only was he intensely interested in life insurance at that moment, he could excitedly talk about the Vancouver Canucks penalty kill, or the different variations of the Boston Bruins power play. He understood why I’d come up with the ruse in the first place. But that didn’t stop him from talking my ear off for three hours on the way to Jamaica about hockey.

– Once in Boston, I remembered what I’d tried so many years to forget: driving a car without a GPS is akin to playing pin the tail on the donkey, only with no donkey to pin the tail upon. You just won’t get there. You won’t. It’s a sick, twisted roadway system, where you only get there by chance luck without a GPS telling you where to go – and even then it’s only half the time.

– The Bruins have a great pregame playoff thing going now, with old former players starting a “wave of the flag” around the lower bowl of the arena. Seeing Bobby Orr get things started for Game 4? Priceless.
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– Against my better judgment, I went to a bar down the street from the TD Garden after the game last night. Of course, exactly what I knew would happen, a big fight broke out right in front of me. Here’s a picture:
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The guy on the far right in that picture is named Jeff Hamrick, an old pal who used to be a sports writer with the Rocky Mountain News and, later, The Denver Post before moving back east with his wife, Cheryl. He now freelances for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune.

Why did I decide to go to a bar after the game, knowing that nothing good happens in a Boston bar after midnight? Because I had a 5 a.m. flight back to Denver, via Charlotte, and so what am I going to do, pay $259 for a hotel room to sleep from 1-3? No. Stay up, get to the airport, sit around, be cranky, get on the flight and tough it out.
This is my final memory of the desultory sit in the airport, watching some Canucks fan still in his game-night jersey trying to charge up his phone before getting on his flight back to Vancouver.
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– The guy next to me on the flight to Charlotte asked what I did for a living and I said “Sports writer.” He shut right up.

– Tomorrow in The Post: The Avs are getting a lot of offers for the No. 2 pick in next Friday’s first round of the NHL Draft. Will they bite? Pick up tomorrow’s paper to learn more.

Terry Frei graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in the Denver area and has degrees in history and journalism from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He worked for the Rocky Mountain News while attending CU and joined the Post staff after graduation. He has also worked at the Oregonian in Portland, Ore., and The Sporting News. His seventh book, March 1939: Before the Madness, was issued in February 2014.

Chambers covers college and professional hockey for The Denver Post. He has written for the Post since 1994, after dumping his first 9-to-5 office job a couple years out of college. He primarily follows the University of Denver hockey team and helps cover the Avalanche.